Chapter 5

Missing the Bus

It has been in life’s daily challenges that I find I have the potential to experience a life of meaning and quality – or the lack of it. As I learned to access my spiritual heart more and more in life’s ordinary day-to-day situations, I found the quality of my daily life not just growing, but expanding exponentially.

I had a very simple experience that helped me recognize how powerful and effective my spiritual heart could be in my life’s everyday problems.

I was driving my two younger children down the hillside to catch the school bus. It is now many years after Kathy’s death. My little baby, Lisa, is now happily married and creating a meaningful life of her own. I have met a wonderful woman, Kathryn, whose love has filled my life and helped me continue in my healing and growing. Kathryn has been a wonderful mother to Lisa, and they have a beautiful bond. We have two delightful children of our own, Peter and Anna, who are now in their early teenage years.

At this point, we were living in California’s beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains. We lived in what looked like a cozy little cottage on a hillside, at the foot of giant redwood trees, in one of that range’s magnificent redwood forests. The home was lovely and took care of the four of us well. It was almost a picture-postcard setting. The only real downside was that Kathryn and I, with our two teenage children, Peter and Anna, shared a single bathroom. If you have had teenage children, or know of someone who has, you will understand that a single bathroom before school and work in the morning is bound to cause a little, or a lot, of friction and frustration.

It was one of those mornings when everything in the house had been chaotic. The children took too long in the bathroom, couldn’t find their homework, and had misplaced their clothes. We were running late. It was a pattern that had happened over and over again. Only this time, “We’ll miss the bus!” wasn’t a worry. It was a reality .

The bus was gone by the time we drove down the hillside and reached the bus stop. It was a long drive to school. I didn’t have time to drive the children to school because I needed to be at work soon. I was frustrated and angry. I had asked and asked the children to start earlier, and not let all these things get left to the last moment, so that this wouldn’t happen.

I had been reading a book on parenting that talked about letting children experience the consequences of their actions. In this situation, that probably meant having them walk to school. I wasn’t comfortable with that, as the school was over eight miles away. We already knew we could not catch up to the school bus because it took a very different route through the forest. We had tried that before. I could not drive them, and I was upset. There was no good way that I could see to deal with this situation.

As we sat there at the bus stop, I remembered about my spiritual heart. Maybe I needed its help. I did need help with how to deal with getting the kids to school. Plus, I don’t like the feeling of being upset even when I “have a right to be.” Maybe this was one of those moments to see if my spiritual heart was available when things went wrong.

I took a moment, actually about ninety seconds, to activate my spiritual heart and ask for its help. (I’ll share with you, in Chapter 7, the steps I took to do that.) As I went through the steps, I felt my body change. I felt the relief as the emotional tension within me released. I experienced a sudden insight that translated itself into a clear thought, that both felt right and was a relief. The important thing is – it worked. At the end of the ninety seconds, I felt calm. I felt more than calm – I actually felt good.

I not only knew what to do, I was looking forward to it. I understood what was important here, and I knew how to resolve the conflicts around the issues that were so frustrating to me just moments before.

I was now looking at this situation very differently than I had, just ninety seconds before. My perspective changed. I had shifted into connection with personal values that were very important to me, values that were not even in my thoughts ninety seconds earlier .

As a result of activating my spiritual heart, my concern shifted from my needs to my children’s needs. I was aware that they had experienced a very stressful morning. All the chaos – the pressure to find the missing homework, and the race down the mountain, and now being late for the bus – was stressful for them . I realized we all played a part in being late – myself included.

They were concerned about getting to school late. They knew that I was upset over missing the bus, and both of these things put pressure on them. Just as I had a full and demanding day before me, so did they. For teenagers, school holds many demands and stresses that are very significant in their world.

I was the one who could get to work late. My co-workers would understand. We were all adults, and many of them also had children.

I turned to my children and said, “I’ll drive you to school today. I want you to be relaxed and have a good day. Will you work with me tomorrow so that this doesn’t happen again?” They both looked very relieved, and promised me they would. I put on some relaxing music and started the long drive to the school.

I felt good. I felt peaceful. I was glad to be caring for my children, and helping them out of a difficult situation. I felt our closeness as a family. In addition, I was at peace being late for my work. I am a very punctual person who is consistently on time. A little flexibility is a good thing.

My spiritual heart responded to my invitation by changing my perception. It put me in touch with my feelings of care for my children. It activated my intuition, which enabled me to understand their needs. It released me from my attitude of blaming, and my judgments about who should have done what, when. My spiritual heart brought my feeling world from frustration and anxiety to clarity and peace. It guided me on how to handle my time conflict in releasing my judgmental response, and replacing it with acceptance and flexibility. From that point forward, I had a lovely day.

When our spiritual nature directs our experiences of life, those experiences change. We are suddenly experiencing what is taking place in our lives differently. I want to say the experience becomes dimensionally different, because I find it difficult to adequately express the magnitude of that difference.

The response I experienced at the bus stop did not feel like just a good idea. That response felt to me dimensionally different from what I was experiencing just a few minutes earlier.

Do you remember when you discovered that you loved someone? Do you remember how magnificent they became in your eyes? How beautiful, how wise, how strong, or how gracious?

That was a gift from your spiritual heart. You began to see them with your spiritual eyes. You understood that person from a deeper place of wisdom within yourself. You activated your spiritual heart – and you touched, and were touched by, their spirit.

Your physical heart is the doorway through which your spiritual self enters into your life experience of the moment. Another of the gifts that results from your spiritual heart, working with and through your physical heart, is the often-elusive experience we refer to as peace .

When we were late for the bus, I was tense. I was frustrated. I was angry and blaming my children. Ninety seconds later I was at peace and I knew what to do. Wow! To be able to connect with a power that transforms me like that is a real treasure.